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Nearly five months after a hack job plundered the personal data of
millions of shoppers, Target is giving its CEO the ax.

Effective today, 35-year company veteran Gregg Steinhafel will
step down, the company’s board announced in a statement. CFO John Mulligan will serve as
interim chief until a replacement is named.

Given that the board’s statement praises the way in which
Steinhafel “held himself personally accountable” for the data
breach, its conclusion that “now is the right time for new
leadership at Target” seems curious -- five months after the
precipitating incident, and also considering that the company’s
CIO, Beth Jacob, already took the fall.

His resignation today raises questions, however, about whether
mere accountability is enough.

To explain the board’s delayed reaction, Joel Trammell, CEO of
Khorus, which creates business management software for
executives, said that “it’s never wise to dismiss a CEO in the
midst of a crisis unless they themselves triggered it.”

“Most incoming CEOs wouldn’t want to accept a job in the throes
of a crisis anyway,” he said -- specifically one like Target’s
requiring highly technical security skills in order to resolve.

Ultimately, however, Trammell believes Steinhafel’s resignation
was less about placating consumers in the face of the breach than
a signal of underperformance. “I don’t know that Target shoppers
care who the CEO of the company is,” he said.

“It’s my belief that CEOs have a lifespan of five or six years,”
he continued. (Steinhafel became president of Target in 1999 and
CEO in 2008.) “After that point, you’ve had time to form a team
and implement your best strategies and ideas. It’s very rare to
find individual who can continue to innovate beyond that
timeline.”